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In my youth, I spent at least a month every summer helping out on my grandparents farm, so I\’m no stranger to piles of manure.  But even with that background I\’m not sure I\’ve seen bullshit piled as high as it was piled last night when President Obama addressed Congress last night.  Some of it, in local parlance, could be termed as Obama \”sanding off the truth\”, others were outright lies, especially egregious as they\’ve been debunked long ago by multiple independent and non-partisan sources.  Since the main complaint about last night\’s fisking was it\’s length, I\’ll just cover the highlights.

Coverage of Illegal Aliens

This is one of the most blatant, not only because it\’s been roundly rebutted but also because it\’s so easy to do so.  At this point attempts to still claim that this bill would not cover illegal aliens require either willful ignorance or outright intentional lies.

While Rep. Wilson might have been out of line in his manner of rebuttal, that hardly means he was wrong.  The non-partisan Congressional Research Service stated, \”Under H.R. 3200, a \’Health Insurance Exchange\’ would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option…H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently—participating in the Exchange.\”  In addition, Republicans tried to include an amendment which would have specifically prohibited illegal aliens from participating.  On a party-line vote, Democrats voted it down.

So while Rep. Wilson may have owed Obama an apology, Obama owes an apology to the American people.

Obama Is Going To Protect Medicare

This part was rather easy to overlook but it confirms the worst fears of seniors every where.

The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies…

What he\’s referring to there is Medicare Advantage.  Medicare Advantage allows seniors to choose a private health plan rather than get their health coverage from the traditional Medicare system.  It\’s also been very popular and arguably the most successful part of Medicare, such that it now accounts for 1 in 5 of all Medicare recipients.  This is the program that Obama is talking about cutting.  So he\’s not protecting Medicare, he\’s killing a very large portion of it currently providing coverage for over 9 million seniors.

If his idea of protecting something is to kill it, I\’m suddenly very concerned about him being our Commander-In-Chief.

Your Insurance Plan Won\’t Change

Yeah, this is one of the biggies and he\’s been reciting it in one variation or another since the beginning, because 80% of the population has coverage and likes what they have.  So he has to give them a warm fuzzy feeling and this is aimed to do that….which would be nice, if it were true.  But let\’s examine the latest version:

First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the V.A., nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.

Let me — let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

Ok to be fair, technically nothing he says here is wrong.  HOWEVER, it\’s intentionally misleading.  The key word in that statement is \”requires\”, which makes the statements true.  What he\’s not saying is that your plan probably isn\’t going to be there in the short term, and almost definitely not in the long run.  This legislation provides financial incentives for employers to stop offering insurance entirely and let you drop onto one of the government run plans.

Basically here\’s how it works.  Employers are required to offer insurance or else they have to pay a penalty.  Thing is that most companies are spending far more on insurance than that penalty.  So it doesn\’t take a financial genius to figure out that only a sucker provides insurance for his employees.  And since you will be required by law to get insurance, you\’ll have to go through the government.  In the end we have a Lord of the Rings type setup:

One Messiah to rule them all, One IRS to find them,
One Public Option to bring them all and in the socialism bind them
In the Land of Washington DC, where the asshole politicians lie.

This Plan Will Be Paid For With Cost Savings

To be honest there are so many ways this is not just wrong but silly, I\’m not even sure where to start.  Fact is that health care reforms since the 70s have promised that cost savings were going to make everything self-sufficient.  Basically the problem is we can\’t just create cost savings by voting it so.  If there were billions in spending that could simply be wished away, we\’d have already done it.  Hell, you\’d have already done it to take away the \”how are we going to pay for it\” talking point from conservatives.

But let\’s pretend it exists.  Why, if you can find $600 billion worth of waste in existing government programs, why do you want to create another?

Lots of government programs start out with claims of being self-sufficient.  Never happens.  In fact, no government program ever costs only it\’s predicted cost.  It always goes up.  NEVER has a government program not costed more than originally predicted.  Yeah, I know my mom always told me \”never say never\”, well I\’m saying never.  Still need convincing? Watch this.

This Plan Won\’t Add One Cent To the Deficit

Not only is this an outright lie but arrogantly so.  Because Obama knows damn well it\’s untrue.  He\’s been embarassed over and over by proof that it\’s not true.  He\’s even tried to bully the Congressional Budget Office into finding otherwise.  The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that this plan, even based on optimistic estimates would add well over $200 billion to the deficit.   That\’s FACT.

The myth is propogated by Obama and the Democrats as they claim it\’s deficit neutral by simply waving away part of the costs.  They\’ve actually claimed they don\’t have to count about $245 billion of it because….well, they don\’t want to.  That\’s accounting in Washington DC for you.

So this will add AT LEAST $200 billion to the deficit and remember government programs almost cost more than estimated.  For a recent related example just look at the prescription drug coverage that was passed under Bush.  It\’s costs have skyrocketed….at this rate the costs for that program will reach the moon before NASA returns.

Preventative Care Will Lower Costs And Save Lives

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Seriously, what\’s it going to take?  How much evidence do you need before you stop repeating lies??  This one doesn\’t even require much to disprove.  Just sit down and think about it for awhile.  Very small portion of the population comes down with these major diseases.  Yeah, they cost alot but only for a few people.  But testing EVERYONE for them, even it a low costs, costs far more than you could ever recoup in preventative care.

But heh, don\’t believe me.  The Congressional Budget Office wrote in August: “The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.”

The New Obama Plan

Ok sure on this I\’m just being petty and bitter, but it\’s still valid.  In the lead up to the speech we were told Obama was drafting his own plan.  His speech even claimed he was introducing a plan.  Of course in that same speech he also claimed in had already passed four committees, which is sort of impressive for a bill that was just introduced.  Either Obama didn\’t introduce shit, or he just invented warp speed…which totally blows away that porn distribution system that Al Gore invented.

Supposedly Obama was actually going to show leadership rather than just tired rhetoric.  Supposedly he was going to finally take control of the process and do all those things he promised during the campaign.  Supposedly we has going to not screw something up.  Well guess what, he didn\’t.  Nothing he described is new.  It\’s all the same old tired plans we\’ve kicked around and screamed at in Town Halls for the last month.

Granted sequels are usually pretty lame but at least Hollywood pretend to come up with a new plot.  Obama didn\’t even bother with that, he just slapped a new label on old plans and called it the solution.  Which is especially scary because if Obama had always been in charge of health care, it\’s unlikely we would have ever moved beyond the \”roots and berries\” phases of healthcare.

30 Million Can\’t Get Health Insurance

Obama used to claim 47 million but apparently the falseness of that got stale even for his lying teleprompter.   The Census Bureau confirmed that that number isn\’t exactly accurate as it includes a lot of illegal aliens, people who qualify for coverage but haven\’t signed up or people that could afford insurance but haven\’t bought it.  Where he came up with this 30 million nobody knows, likely including Obama himself.

The AP is reporting that this new figure came from a study done by the liberal Kaiser Foundation.  But apparently they glossed over some of the details, because even the Kaiser Foundation \”puts the number of uninsured Americans who don\’t qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million.\”

In short it was never 47 million, it\’s not even 30 million, as Obama should well know.  But dang it, 10 million just isn\’t a big enough number to scare people with.  Hence a constantly changing made up figure is needed to keep up the ruse.

For a guy that claims to want to clear up misinformation, President Obama seems to spend an awful lot of time making up and distributing plenty of lies himself.  Most of them are not innocent mistakes but intentional efforts to hide the truth for a political agenda.  That\’s bad enough when we\’re bailing out auto makers, but when it\’s about health care, lives are literally at stake.  There is no room for such acts, and Obama \’s persistence in doing so is appalling.  Perhaps Obama should check into his own public option, he seems to have a pathological condition that needs addressing.

[Crossposted to True North]